Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday May 13, 2011 @03:58PM
from the things-most-people-will-ignore dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Adobe has released Flash Player 10.3, which includes enhanced privacy controls for how your activity is tracked online. Users can now clear local storage — sometimes known as 'Flash cookies' — on versions of Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox. Flash cookies, or local shared objects, made headlines last year when the Federal Trade Commission released a report that called on browser makers to include a 'do not track' option in their products. The FTC also mentioned Adobe because it said the cookies gathered by Flash are collected regardless of the browser's settings."

Has anyone ever experienced a single ill effect, or even slight inconvenience, from deleting ~/.adobe and ~/.macromedia and replacing both with symlinks to/dev/null?

If not, I wonder how difficult it would be to make those an/etc/skel/ default in major distributions. It should be an easy sell, considering decisions with fewer benefits that cause problems for many more users (such as replacing ALSA with PulseAudio as a default sound system) have become default for several major distros.

I have my ~/.adobe and.macromedia folders linked to a ramdisk. Sometimes it's necessary to allow flash cookies for limited time uses. For example, once southparkstudios.com wouldn't load and temporarily enabling flash cookies resolved the problem (my memory is hazy, but I think this happened about a year and a half ago). Since I turn off my computer every night, it's (hopefully) not a big deal if my cookies are only saved for a few hours/days at a time. Likewise, I think it's relatively safe if I set firef

Orly? So if I leave all of my information unprotected on my laptop and it gets stolen, all I have to do is contact my ISP and everything is safe? And here I thought encryption, passwords, etc were helping, I'm, such, a, fool!,!,!,!,! Hey everyone, my password is chol5era, go ahead try to use it, hardware and ISP will protect me!

Maybe I'm just very lucky but I'm not seeing a lot of video's that don't load, this is with Safari maybe there are less WebM video's than H.264 ? The interface could use a little TLC but I guess non-flash technologies are taking a backseat at Google at the moment.

I first knew Flash was evil when there were no such controls in the first version ever released.

How much more acceptance would there be of this product if they had just built in some levelof end-user control from the beginning? Cookie clearing, Don't play till I say, No sound till I say,Continuous loops controls, etc, etc.

Instead they thru all their weight at supporting punch-the-monkey advertisers and to hell withthe users.

Instead they thru all their weight at supporting punch-the-monkey advertisers and to hell with the users.

Which made them an obscure company that only the most hardcore geeks have ever heard of, producing software that no one uses.

That would have been more ideal anyway.

Instead, "users" tend to display the same masochism as the most stereotypical battered spouses. "He didn't mean it, I'll give him benefit of doubt, this time he'll CHANGE, he said he'd change and I know he really means it, all those other tim

"I first knew Flash was evil when there were no such controls in the first version ever released."

Checking into reality can lead to less unhappiness. When Flash introduced local-storage towards 2002, there was also per-domain control. But a SWF can be any size, and Player has no native UI chrome. That's why the context-click to call up "Settings" brought up a webpage, which hosted a SWF using and controlling your own local data.

In the last few years browsers have also introduced local-storage, and so awaren

Personally, I've hated Flash for almost a decade and don't install it if I can avoid it... usually my work machines end up needing it for some 3rd party site they force us to use. But, I don't make a habit of having it enabled.

I'm not sure I can name one instance where I found Flash to be useful or something I'd want. Although, who knows, maybe I'm missing out on something really cool... but my experience with Flash has primarily been about having half a dozen ads on screen that

Personally, I've hated Flash for almost a decade and don't install it if I can avoid it... usually my work machines end up needing it for some 3rd party site they force us to use. But, I don't make a habit of having it enabled.

I'm not sure I can name one instance where I found Flash to be useful or something I'd want. Although, who knows, maybe I'm missing out on something really cool... but my experience with Flash has primarily been about having half a dozen ads on screen that are all in motion.

Well, that and the fact that it's been a gaping security hole since forever.

I agree... Besides, Flash is just like using JavaScript (well... ActionScript) to animate a bunch of graphics primitives or to stream a video. These are things that browsers can do without Flash -- I mean, HTML5 gives you almost all the same featu r e s --- HEY! Shit! We've been dupped into letting the browser makers create their own integrated version of Flash!

Oh, never mind -- It's all OK, it will be codified as a web standard...Just like the current HTML4.01 is -- What could possibly go wrong?

Its not at all clear that this is tracking. That term was introduced by the link you posted.

From the source quoted in the link you posted:

Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.

How distributed, Audience numbers, and how much of the video is actually viewed seem pretty innocuous on their face.The devil, of course. is in the details. It could be all server side, with no tracking per say, everything you could currently get from from a web server log (user agent ID, hit counts) plus additional info (such as percent/bytes transmitted) from the stre

Its not at all clear that this is tracking. That term was introduced by the link you posted.

From the source quoted in the link you posted:

Media Measurement for Flash allows companies to get real-time, aggregated reporting of how their video content is distributed, what the audience reach is, and how much video is played.

How distributed, Audience numbers, and how much of the video is actually viewed seem pretty innocuous on their face.The devil, of course. is in the details. It could be all server side, with no tracking per say, everything you could currently get from from a web server log (user agent ID, hit counts) plus additional info (such as percent/bytes transmitted) from the streaming engine.

But this is Adobe. So we are left with assuming evil intent or simple incompetence. My Hanlon Meter [wikiquote.org] pegs both pins when Adobe is involved.

That's just it. The reasonable assumption is that there is no sense in implementing a new "feature" that doesn't tell companies anything they couldn't already know from their HTTP logs. There is already a plethora of tools for parsing HTTP logs and gleaning usage information. As a business decision it wouldn't make much sense for Adobe to create a "me too!" reinvention of that wheel; the resources would be better spent elsewhere. It's well-founded to assume until proven otherwise that this is a more int

All I want is a button that will set flash content to load only with approval. This is already done third party, but if Adobe did it one might think Flash was more than just a method to push near pornographic advertising onto innocent users. As it is, the infrastructure to approve cookies is horribly unreliable.

Over umpteen versions and so many years, and they still haven't added settings to disable audio (banners and embedded video commercials with audio enabled have become worse over time) and it has only grown increasingly bloated over hogging processing and memory. Thankfully Opera makes it simple and accessible to disable the plugin for the majority of browsing, or even on a per-site basis for the worst offenders. But these are things that Adobe should be implementing so users can take control of what plays

I've been running Flash free for several months, except for Flash built in to Chrome. I don't use Chrome as my primary browser, so sites see me as someone without Flash. When I need to access something that requires Flash, I open it in Chrome. If it requires Flash and it won't work in Chrome, I won't use the site.

I don't need to update anything, I don't have Flash installed, and I want it that way. Very few give me a message saying I need to install Flash Player for the site to function (correctly). Note to site developers, STOP designing sites that require Flash to work.

While I'm happy to see this as an end user - they did have good applications as well. They were a great mechanism for tracking fraudsters across cookie wipes... The more savvy ones knew better but for those who didn't it saved us a lot of losses...

Agreed. The continued silence from Adobe regarding native 64-bit-capable Flash players for ANY platform is a major problem on their part that needs to be fixed - I haven't heard a word about new 64-bit releases for Windows or Mac OS X, much less Linux.

It seems non Windows users are left in the cold whether they use 64 bit or not.

The mac I think finally has video acceleration but the Windows users still have the best experience... this is for the 32 bit version. Windows 7 has had full hardware acceleration with 64 bit since 10.1.

For about 15 years I would install Flash upon getting a new machine or restoring one. I might go by a few days without downloading the plugin, but eventually there would be some circumstance where I conceded.

I've been using the iPad most of the day lately and the lack of Flash is rarely a problem, certainly not one that would convince me to leave the couch and go to my desktop. When I do encounter Flash my first thought is, "Good thing this will soon disappear like RealPlayer eventually did.". If your web